I was a little
disappointed, in some ways. I had hoped the meeting would be a bit more interdisciplinary,
despite its strong connections to the American Computing Society. It was pretty
much computer scientists all the way down. But thats where multi-agent
and autonomous agent systems live intellectually. One should not be surprised
that the sun is in the sky during the daytime.

The consequence
for me was that I understood very little of what I saw and heard. Every once
in a while, the light broke through the clouds, generally in papers that were
very explicitly devoted to using multi-agent systems for social simulation,
those more concerned with the conceptual design and application of their simulations
and less concerned with the formalisms, protocols or algorithms underlying them.
I was able to grasp one presentation on the simulation of social insects and
pheremones (due to the intensely well-travelled nature of the example) and even
to see that the presentation offered relatively little that was new on that
topic. I really liked one presentation that proposed a formalism for generating
irrational agents, or at least for nesting normal Bayesian game-theoretic rationalities
one step away from the functioning of a multi-agent system. It seemed very innovative
and intelligible, particularly given that I was struck by how utterly reliant
the whole field has become on rational optimizing designs for agents. I was
also struck at the extent to which the demand for application to commercial
needs drove the vast majority of presentations.

At most other points,
however, not only did I not understand anything, I barely understood what Id
have to understand in order to understand a presentation.

I repeatedly extoll
the virtues of generalism, but it cannot do everything. The sinking feeling
I repeatedly had during the conference was knowing that to even get to the point
where I grasped the substantive difference between different algorithms or formalisms
proposed by many of the researchers at this conference, where I could meaningfully
evaluate which were innovative and important, and which were less attractive,
would take me years of basic study: study in mathematics, study in computer
science, study in economics, areas where Ive never been particularly gifted
or competent at any point in my life. To get from understanding to actually
doing or teaching would be years more from there, if ever.

The reverse movement
often seems easier, from the sciences to the social sciences or humanities,
and in truth, it is. Theres an important asymmetry that I think is a big
part of the social purpose of the humanities, that intellectual work in that
domain returns, or should return, broadly comprehensible and communicative insights
rather than highly technical ones, and thus, that the barriers to entry are
lower.

The ease of that
move is deceptive, however. Its the kind of thing that leads someone like
Jared Diamond or other sociobiologically inclined thinkers, especially evolutionary
psychologists, to what I call ethnographic tourism. Operating out
of a framework that requires the assumption of universalisms in order to make
cogent hypotheses about human history and behavior, scholars coming along that
path often quickly scoop up the studies and accounts which support the foundational
assertion of a universal and ignore those which do not or casually dismiss them
as biased or culturalist, regardless of the methodology those studies
employ. Thats what leads to their peculiar preference for the work of
Napoleon Chagnon on the Yanomano, for example. Bogus or wild-eyed controversies
about immunizations and manipulation aside, theres at least reason from
an utterly mainstream, meticulous, scrupulous and disinterested perspective
to view some of his methodologies as debatable and to take seriously the work
of other scholars who have made very different findings. Theres a selectivity
principle at work in ethnographic tourism that wouldnt be tolerated if
it wasn't scientists cherry-picking material from anthropological scholarship
they like and ignoring contradictory work.

That is not atypical
of what can happen when scientists pressing towards generalism think they understand
disciplines outside the natural sciences. Similarly, its become easy to
mock and ignore scholarship in the humanities for being too theoretical, fashionable,
incoherent, and so on, which it very often is. Alan Sokals hoax hit a
real target, but if you want to think and write about problems like the nature
of existence and knowledge, or about why and what a cultural work means to its
audiences, sometimes you really are going to have to go into deep waters that
require a complex conceptual framework. Some scientists tend to forget that
on a series of crucial issues, skeptics in the humanities were closer to the
truth for decades than scientists, most notably in the early debate between
philosophers of mind, neuroscientists and computer scientists working on artificial
intelligence about how easy it would be to create AI.

That debate is
an important reminder, however, of what a kind of disciplined drift towards
generalism can bring. The intensely fertile contemporary practice of cognitive
science draws from all those areas and more besides. It almost seems to me that
a good generalist ought to combine an overall curiosity and fluency in the generality
of knowledge with a structured search of the possibility space of the intellectual
neighborhoods which are just far away enough from their specializations to return
novel possibilities and angles of attack but just close enough that those neighborhoods
are potentially accessible with a reasonable amount of scholarly labor. To think
about generalism in this way is to realize that different generalists are not
going to end up in the same place. Their mutual engagements or conversations
will have to happen in places of accidental overlap, because the concentric
circles of one's own generalist competency are going to differ because they
originate out of different initial specializations.

Proximity to your
own discipline and specialization can also be deceptive. Im planning another
version of my Primary Text Workshop course for academic year 05-06. Id
like it to involve the students in doing the preparatory work that would be
required for making a virtual reality environment based on a historical communitythe
speech trees, the knowledge of clothing and other material culture, the architectural
and geographical knowledge, the understanding of everyday life rhythms, and
so on. Id prefer it be about a city whose history I know very wellJohannesburg
or Cape Town spring to mindbut access to primary materials will obviously
be limited. On the other hand, late colonial Philadelphia seems an apt choice,
but I find myself simply overwhelmed by the literature Id have to read
in between now and then in order to achieve a basic comfort level. Its
not enough to have read Alan Taylor, Timothy Breen, Gordon Wood and so on about
the colonial and revolutionary eraId need to go far deeper historiographically
than that, and at that point, you begin to wonder whether it isnt just
smarter to hand the class off to a colleague who already specializes in that
era.

Ive been
thinking about how to calculate the wider bounds of generalism beyond the discipline.
In my case, for example, some of the ideas associated with complex systems,
emergence, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems and so on are close enough
conceptually that I can make use of them and contribute insights to colleagues
working in those areas, but theyre just far enough away that I should
not ever expect to do original work directly in computing applications myself.
Sociobiology might be close enough that I could reasonably expect to offer some
critical insights into its methods, but not close enough that I could expect
to do my own original research into population genetics. Theoretical physics
would be far enough away in every respect that I might not ever reasonably expect
to understand it, let alone do it, given that much of it cannot even be translated
from its mathematical conception into broadly communicative prose. At that point,
you have to have enough faith in the entire system of knowledge production to
just say, I trust you to do what you do, and to do it how you do itand
if it becomes imperative to do more, as it does in the case of tenure review,
you just have to outsource the job of deciding whether another scholars
work is original or skilled to someone else, to have the humility to know where
the final outer bound of a generalist intellect lies.